What about providing designated drinking areas for what are often labelled the “transient” and “homeless”?

OK, how’s your front garden sound, Kev?

As for Anne Martin’s view of the Palace Pier as the manager of it, she asks people to finish drinks before coming on to the pier, but it’s OK for her to have a pub at the end of it.

Well, yes. That’s hardly strange.
It’s perfectly OK to sell someone a car, but frown when they run their mother-in-law over with it…

I think this is a form of social class prejudice.

Really? You mean people object to rambling, incoherent street drunks hassling passers by for change and evacuating their bowels in the street?

How bourgeois of them!

It seems people view outdoor drinking as a nasty blot on the landscape.

Actually, no. People having a few glasses of wine or beer on a picnic blanket in a park is perfectly acceptable, so long as they take the bottles home with them.
Homeless drunks necking Special Brew and fighting on street corners isn’t.